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Larry Wall's State of the Onion 8
zachlipton writes "Perl.com has posted Larry Wall's State of the Onion talk from this year's Open Source Convention and The Perl Conference. Through the use of various screensavers, Wall talks a bit about himself, and of course, Perl and Perl 6."
GW Bush's state of the union made no sense whatsoever and was full of the same BS as we can always expect from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their ilk.
Larry Wall's state of the onion was entertaining and informative. You just have to learn to think "outside the box" because TMTOWTDI.
Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line
wow that is awesome...I had no idea...I would like to clarify that the mission of CS courses at GT is to "teach concepts," not to "learn languages". Hence my first CS course (august of 1999...still have another year of my undergrad...I am lazy) being taught using only pseudo code. I learned the concepts, sure, but the class would have been a lot more fun had we been using Python.
At my job I work about half in C++ and half in Python...and it is a joy to use. I used to hate it and would only code in Perl...but those days are long gone. Perhaps perl6 will be better, but I find these days that I can't stand to touch perl code. Converting ~10 Perl files to python (Palm's Palm Emulator & Simulator come with a Perl interface, Keith was supposed to distribute my python version with all new Emulator versions buuuut....) was a huge pain due to perl's built-in obfuscation, not to mention its bad "global variable" habits... Python is still annoying in its lack of for (only having foreach, named for) and do loops, forced indentation (tabs vs spaces problem, non-deterministic if spacing gets messed up), and self being a required argument for every class method...but it's still amazing. Its interactive interpreter is probably the most useful application I have installed on my machine at work. Even when I'm on a C++ project I keep a python interpreter open to prototype and test code segments, convert between different display formats of numbers, generate utf-8 unicode strings, quickly start an interactive TCP socket server or client, do bitwise arithmetic, general math problems, generate test files on the fly, do data conversion....it's a programmer's best friend.
Python, with the help of its large standard library, makes writing applications incredibly fast. Last week I was assigned a small project which was to send large amounts of email for stress-testing purposes based on data found in XML files and inputs from the program's user. Nothing hard, but it involved xml parsing, speaking SMTP, Unicode, and a GUI. I recommended python, and it was done in 5 hours...with almost 2 hours of that spent on trying to figure out which smtp servers accepted what forms of Unicode encoding and how quirky they were about Content-types and charsets. Perhaps some ub3r-r33t C++ haX0r could do it in 5 hours in C++...but I'd be surprised. And, as always, if performance is a critical issue for some portion, writing a class in C++ and wrapping it as a python class with SWIG is about as painless as can be.
Perl isn't a terrible language, and it's spawned some great things (PCRE > *; also I tend to think PHP was inspired in large part by Perl and it's pretty awesome for web applications); I also admire Larry Wall a lot. But if you enjoy coding and haven't tried Python out yet, give it a shot.